The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus is a delightful (splendid, delectable, diverting, satisfying) volume that goes beyond mere synonyms to include word spectrums, usage advice and little jewels of notes from a variety of great authors. I might have switched to Mac sooner if I’d known Apple was smart enough to build it into their operating system. But I recently bought the paper version for the sheer sensual pleasure of browsing it.

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“The Three Oddest Words”

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past.

It’s hard to capture the playful, skewed perspective of Miranda July’s storytelling in an excerpt—her stories are best apprehended all at once, like a photograph or painting. I’ve given this book away to dozens of people. Some even liked it.

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’She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call “very beautiful except for.” This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them. We mostly want to stare at them like the optical illusion of a vase made out of the silhouette of two people kissing. Now it is a vase … now it could only be two people kissing … oh, but it is so completely a vase. It is both! Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin.

If you know his work, and given my leaning toward brevity here, you might be surprised to find this poet in clippings. But Peter writes fine poems, short and long.

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Two translations of a poem by Jean Follain, a poet I’ve become infatuated with…which necessarily leads to fascination with the choices made by translators. Such seemingly small differences make, break or significantly change these precise poems’ meaning and aesthetics. See also: the original French and a third translation.

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An excerpt today from a long and apparently polarizing (love it or hate it) book I’m enjoying. Don’t worry, this is as long as clippings get!

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’A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

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“At the Street Corner”

Maybe my soul’s all right. But my body’s all wrong, All bent and twisted, All this that hurts me so.

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I couldn’t choose between them, so two translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s final poem, written just ten days before his death. According to his doctor’s letters, Rilke only realized death was imminent three days before he died…making this a poem more about pain than dying.

“Komm du, du Letzer”

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“Clothing the Dead”

What is a locust? Its head, a grain of corn; Its neck, the hinge of a knife; Its horns, a bit of thread; Its chest is smooth and burnished; Its body is like a knife handle; Its hock, a saw; its spittle, ink; Its underwings clothing for the dead. On the ground—it is laying eggs; In flight—it is like the clouds. Approaching the ground, it is rain Glittering in the sun; Lighting on a plant, it becomes A pair of scissors; Walking, it becomes A razor. Desolation walks with it.

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“Weather”

In the sky’s envelope there is a letter for us. A vast stretch of air in wide orange and white strips. The gentle giant goes in front of us: he is rocking back and forth. He carries a shining ball attached to a thick club.

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